


o who sits weeping on my grave (and will not let me sleep)

by custardpringle



Category: Endeavour (TV), Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gen, canon-typical peril to historic architecture, casefic, discussion of child death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:48:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23391226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/custardpringle/pseuds/custardpringle
Summary: "Do you believe in ghosts?""Ghosts?" says Morse. “Good god, no.” He believes in mass delusion; more charitably, he believes in the mortal human need to make sense of the senseless."Well, funny thing; everyone says the stacks are haunted." Trewlove says it so matter-of-factly that it’s impossible to tell how seriously she takes the idea.
Comments: 21
Kudos: 99





	o who sits weeping on my grave (and will not let me sleep)

**Author's Note:**

> This was a surprisingly delicate crossover machine to get ticking! Thanks to mimesere, bettafish, and Bunny McFoo for betaing the stuffing out of it, plus Susie and Iona for the Oxfordpick.
> 
> Temperatures are given in Fahrenheit, in accordance with most late 1960s newspapers. I take full responsibility for this decision.

“Disturbance of the peace, sir?” Morse tries to make the question matter-of-fact.

He doesn’t wholly succeed, if Thursday’s glower is anything to judge by. “Yes, Morse. A mere lowly disturbance of the peace. Some kind of undergraduate prank, sounds like. I know you like a fancy puzzle box, but they can’t all be like that, can they?”

“Of course not.” Morse rises to his feet, a little abashed; of course he’d never wish for a murder.

It’s only that Oxford’s been mercifully quiet since his promotion finally came through, and even more so since winter set in. 1967 has rolled over into ‘68, an unusually bitter January is freezing the city nearly into hibernation, and he’ll take whatever’s available to sink his teeth into.

He doesn’t regret turning down London, in the end, but lately he’s caught himself thinking once or twice that at least it wouldn’t be this bloody boring.

“And Morse!”

“Yes, sir?” He glances up as he shrugs on his coat.

Thursday pauses in the doorway to his office, and then seems to come to a decision. “Best bring Trewlove along. She’s good at wrangling crowds.”

\-------

Morse didn’t much enjoy his last trip to the underbelly of the Radcliffe Camera--even now, the squeal of iron shelves moving along their tracks, somewhere out of sight, inspires a twinge between his ribs. He doesn’t care for it now either, under calmer circumstances. It’s shadowy and mechanical and too cool, like the winter can’t be kept out, and he fancies he hears a faint dripping from somewhere as he and Trewlove descend the stairs. Unacceptable in a world-class library, surely. The dim underground labyrinth might as well be a different planet from the vast sunny reading rooms upstairs.

Then again, he never liked to work here, even when he was a student. He used to find a place as far back out of sight in the Old Bod stacks as possible, picking and picking away at an essay from every angle, half-hoping--when the writing was particularly intractable--to be missed when the library closed, locked in and left in peace for the night.

Susan somehow, unerringly, always found him amidst the forest of stacks, urging him in a whisper to take a break, get some air--

“Oh my God,” says Trewlove, frozen on the step below him. “Morse.”

The stacks look like they’ve been through an earthquake. Most of the books are scattered on the floor, some of them splayed painfully face-down. Half a dozen staff are milling around, all talking at once. Morse barely has time to get the measure of the situation before someone breaks the line and skitters a few steps up to meet them.

It’s a young man, tall and sharp-featured, not many years older than Morse. He’s in his shirtsleeves--smudged with drying yellow glue--and his glasses are slightly askew, emphasizing a general air of alarm. “Are you--oh, of course you are, the uniform. Sorry.”

Morse introduces himself and Trewlove as briefly as possible. “What’s happened? We understood a disturbance--”

“Yes, yes,” says the man, dismissively. “But I work in one of the special collections, officer, and something’s gone missing.”

\------- 

“I’ve heard there’s a whole maze of tunnels under here,” says Trewlove thoughtfully, as they pick their cautious path through the books carpeting the floor. “There could be all kinds of secrets hidden away.” She’s only speculating, making conversation; there’s not much fanciful about Trewlove.

“It’s a myth,” says Morse. The harried man guiding them--Dr. Postmartin, he calls himself--opens a heavy service door, and the Link yawns before them, grubby institutional black-and-white. “There’s only this one here, leading direct through the Old Bodleian to the New Bod.”

“Pity,” says Trewlove. "I was out here on a shout once, found a drunken undergraduate digging a hole in the lawn. Something about smugglers' tunnels, he said. Right before he was sick down the front of my uniform."

Morse snorts. Their footsteps echo as they cross the threshold onto white tile. It reminds Morse of the mortuary.

Postmartin clears his throat with a hint of pride. “In fact, ah, Sergeant? Constable?”

He unlocks another, smaller door, barely noticeable in the blank white expanse of wall--not hidden, exactly, but certainly not meant to be noticed. Beyond it stretches another, narrower, hallway.

“Ah,” says Morse, caught wrong-footed, but only momentarily annoyed. His fingers twitch, even buried in his coat pockets; he can all but feel the seams of a puzzle begin to take shape in his hands.

"Sergeant!" Another aide materializes out of the gloomy stacks behind them. "You asked us to collect the staff upstairs?"

Trewlove glances at him. “I’ll go up and get the measure of them, shall I?”

"Go on," says Morse. "I'll join you in a bit. No smugglers' caves for you today, I'm afraid."

"Privilege of rank, I suppose." Trewlove flashes him a rueful smile and heads back the way they came.

It takes another three or four turnings to reach their destination. Clearly Postmartin’s specialty--whatever it is--is either particularly important or particularly unimportant, but regardless a burglar would have to be very determined. And very knowledgeable.

“You do _have_ an office down here somewhere?” Morse offers by way of a half-hearted joke.

“Not exactly,” says Postmartin, unexpectedly. “It’s Dr. Gretchen Andrews’ territory, really, and I’m only her assistent. But she’s been half-dead with the flu all week, not even picking up the phone at home this morning, I’ve already tried.” He laughs nervously. “If something’s gone, it’ll be _such_ a mess. Oh, hell.”

Dr. Andrews' office, then, is a large box of a room full of the same iron shelving as the main basement. A card catalog stands in one corner; a battered oak desk, constellated with tea stains and a scattering of tools, in another. The rows of shelves are all empty.

The better part of the collection has been dumped onto the floor, and all the catalogue drawers yanked out of place. Papers and catalogs are heaped up against the walls and shelves like snowdrifts; the books are all dumped carelessly on the floor, many of them sprawled dangerously face-down.

Morse sidles carefully through the mess, scanning over a jumble of languages--Latin, Greek, German. “What exactly is the focus of this collection?”

There’s a quiet rattle behind him; Morse glances around to see Postmartin take off his glasses to wipe furtively at them. “Some lesser works of Isaac Newton, other related books and papers. Not terribly interesting.”

“A Newton collection? At Oxford?”

“It’s eccentric stuff. I’ve always rather imagined Cambridge finds it too embarrassing to get territorial about it. I really can’t think why anyone would want--”

Morse hums indistinct sympathy. “Is the collection available for retrieval?” If something’s been stolen, it’s a remarkably specific and esoteric theft; his first interest is in whoever is already familiar with the collection. 

“Technically, yes, but we don’t exactly advertise its existence, and we keep a separate catalogue. Not like they could get a trolley back here in any case.” Postmartin laughs again; it’s no more convincing the second time.

Morse crouches in front of the catalog, surveying the scattered cards but careful not to disturb them. “You’d better take me through the morning. What’s gone wrong, and in what order?”

Postmartin swallows. His glasses are back in place, but he can’t seem to meet Morse’s eyes. “I got in, oh, half eight? I was doing some restoration work on a manuscript--I wanted to get it done before Gretchen gets better. She’s getting on in years, you know, and her hands aren’t too steady these days, so she’s always behind on the preservation work. Around ten I wanted a break and a cup of tea, so I went down the hall to the main stacks and found everyone in a panic. Papers and books flying everywhere.”

“Flying,” Morse repeats. “Can you elaborate?”

Postmartin shrugs. “Have you ever seen _The Wizard of Oz_?”

“I get the idea, thanks.” An idea which Morse earmarks for later clarification. “And then what did you do?”

“I thought of my own department at once. I ran back downstairs to check and found the whole place like this. The manuscript I was working on is--well, it’s gone from my desk, as you see. Gretchen’s going to be furious when she gets back.” He gestures at the desk, where there’s a large oblong gap amongst the brushes and bone folders and glue bottles.

“What book were you working on?”

“ _Treatise sur la puissance dans la solitude, partie 3_ \--Treatise on the power in solitude, part 3, of how many I don’t know offhand. Jean-Paul de Beaumont. 1758. A handwritten manuscript, not a book--perhaps fifty loose pages collected inside a single folded piece of red leather.”

The title means nothing to Morse. “Is it valuable? Financially speaking.”

“Not especially. A curiosity.”

“Then what was it about?”

“I have very little idea, I’m afraid.”

Morse frowns at him. “How could you not? You must have examined it closely while repairing it.”

“I make a point--professionally speaking--to avoid reading books I’m meant to be repairing. Otherwise the work would never get done. I will say--it was certainly a very peculiar object.”

“Peculiar how?”

”The writing had been used to form patterns on the page. Right angles, sections of spirals and circles perhaps, other geometric figures. I did hope to take a closer look once the repairs were complete.” Postmartin takes his glasses off and wipes them yet again. “Would you mind if I start putting things right? There may be other books damaged. In fact--” He brightens noticeably. “The _Treatise_ may yet turn up in this pile somewhere. I’d hate for you to go to all this trouble for nothing.”

“I don’t see why not.” Morse rises, brushing his hands off on his trousers; he’d like a better look through this catalogue, but not, perhaps, in Postmartin’s presence.

\-------

“That man is sweating bullets,” Morse says afterwards, comparing notes with Trewlove at a table upstairs. “And it does have a whiff of an inside job, doesn’t it, someone getting all the way down there and out again without being seen.”

“Can’t be,” says Trewlove. “He’s the one who asked for us. Why bother reporting the books are gone, if he took them himself?”

“I don’t know,” Morse admits. “But he tried to call his boss before he told us. And he certainly didn’t seem to want me once I was there.” He sighs and leaves the question to simmer, for the moment, on a figurative back burner. “How’d you make out with the rest?”

Trewlove ruffles the edge of her notebook with her thumb. "Do you believe in ghosts?"

"Ghosts?" says Morse. “Good god, no.” He believes in mass delusion; more charitably, he believes in the mortal human need to make sense of the senseless.

"Well, funny thing; everyone says the stacks are haunted." She says it so matter-of-factly that it’s impossible to tell how seriously she takes the idea.

“Haunted.”

She slides the notebook across the table to him. “There’ve been odd things happening for months, it seems, and worse lately, but nowhere near as dramatic as this. A few librarians even said they’d seen someone sneaking around lately--but not today.”

Morse flips through, skimming page after page of her immaculate script, leafs back to the beginning and jots down a handful of names for himself. “Could you go talk to the staff in the Old Bod this afternoon, where the far end of the Link comes out? If the manuscript was carried out that way; someone might have seen something.”

She holds out one hand to take her notebook back. “Better you than me, making anything useful out of all that.”

“The privilege of rank, eh, Trewlove?”

“Exactly.”

\-------

It’s as sparse a time around the Bodleian as anywhere else, the gray space between terms when all but the most dedicated or lonely of students melt away to spend Christmas and the New Year with family. All that’s left this morning was a dozen or so staff members rattling around the Link, putting in long hours to get everything in order before everyone stampedes back at the start of term and sets them on their heels again. It’ll be more trouble than ever for them now, and Morse tries to keep it mercifully brief when he talks to the witnesses again.

It clears up nothing, in any case.

The staff are a mix of men and women, ages twenty to sixty, and they all agree that the stacks look like a cyclone came through because a cyclone did, in fact, come through. The details vary, but not in any way inconsistent with the ways in which witness accounts generally vary; a stiff wind blew through a sealed underground space and ransacked the shelves, depositing books in drifts on the floor in a matter of seconds. Funny little things like this have been going on since November, apparently, books and papers seeming to move around on their own when people look away. Everyone has a story or two like that; Morse takes them all with a grain of salt.

“It’s a little girl,” says one librarian. “I’ve seen her around.”

“A little girl,” Morse repeats. “The daughter of one of the staff, maybe?”

“God, no.” The librarian, a bespectacled middle-aged wraith of a man named Seldon, looks appalled. “We’d never allow that down here; it isn’t safe. In twenty-five years I’ve only known one boy to make his way down here, and that was because he was American and thought we called it the underground book store because there was a souvenir shop somewhere about.”

“But you said you saw a girl.”

“Only glimpses,” says Seldon. “I’ll hear footsteps running around, that kind of thing, and when I go to see there’s just the shadow of a skirt flitting around a corner. Never anyone there when I go to look, of course. You might ask Harris; he’s seen her, too.”

“Heard her, mostly,” says Mr. Harris, when Morse asks. “Giggling away just out of sight. I saw her once for a moment, but she ran off into the stacks and disappeared.”

“It’s not the easiest place to find someone in,” Morse observes.

“It’s moveable shelving, Sergeant.” Harris frowns judgmentally over his glasses. “The shelves she ran between were barely two inches apart. Hardly room for a cat, never mind a child. You might ask that new girl Thompson; she said she’d heard things too.”

“I haven’t heard a thing,” says Miss Thompson, with a sniff. “No children, no giggling, no funny chills. It’s easiest to humor sour old things like Seldon and Harris, that’s all, or they hold it against you forever and the job’s impossible.”

Morse notes it down as the most concrete information he’s got, but he severely doubts a little girl could wreak this kind of havoc on the stacks in a matter of seconds.

No one saw anybody out of place today, child or otherwise. No one has the faintest clue what’s happened, never mind why. Three more people ask him if he’s ever seen _The Wizard of Oz._ He gives up and lets them all get on with the reshelving.

The practical next step would be to go back to the station and type up what he’s got so far, but Morse’s intellectual decorum revolts at the thought of validating this nonsense by setting it down in black and white.

Instead he ventures out for an evening paper and spends a few minutes just inside the entrance, hunched up against the cold and jabbing irritably at the _Mail_ crossword until Trewlove rejoins him. “God, I thought I’d never taste fresh air again.”

“Find anything out?”

“I’ve talked to everyone who was downstairs in the Old Bod. If someone crept down from that end of the Link to get into the archive while Postmartin was out of the room, no one else spotted it.”

Morse taps his pen on his hand and pulls a face. “That’s the theme of the day, seems like.”

“I stopped in to meet Postmartin, too,” she goes on. “Just to get the measure of him, you know?”

“And what did you think?”

“Scared of someone. Might be us, might just be his boss, if she’s a tartar.” Trewlove shrugs deeper into her coat as they push out through the front doors. “He’s just started getting his catalogue in order, but I asked him to let us know if anything else turns up missing.”

It’s not terribly late, but night has fallen outside, and the cold is more dull and bitter than ever. Morse wishes it would snow, storm, anything to break up this endless downward creep of the mercury.

“No one else seems to have missed anything, but I suppose it’s early days to tell yet.” He scowls. This isn’t a puzzle box, no; this is water through his hands, perfectly simple and utterly impossible. “Trewlove.”

“Yes?”

“You’re on traffic duty tomorrow morning, aren’t you?”

“Believe so. Why?”

“I think I’ll go check on our languishing Dr. Andrews while you’re out. See if she’s well enough to tell us more about her pet archive.”

\-------

Bright and Thursday have been passing the same flu back and forth since before Christmas, like a pathetic game of table tennis. Lately they're present at the station only by turns, one man presenting himself as the peevish, sniffling face of authority for a few days, then the other.

Today it's Bright, and he emerges from his office looking baffled. "Morse. Step into my office, won’t you?"

When he enters Bright's office, the door clicks shut behind him; Bright himself hasn't followed. "Sir?" says Morse, glancing around.

"Detective Sergeant Morse, I take it." 

The man sitting in front of Bright’s desk is white-haired and nearly gaunt, hands and chin braced heavily on his walking stick. Morse takes him at first for over seventy, too old and too well-tailored for a policeman, but his gaze is sharp and measuring. He’s not as old as he looks; what this man is is very tired.

"DCI Nightingale." He sits up and loosens his grip on the cane, offering a hand. "Metropolitan Police."

Morse shakes hands obligingly. "A little off your own patch, aren’t you? Sir."

"The call ought to have come to me first, Sergeant.”

"What call, sir?"

“This incident at the Bodleian,” says Nightingale severely, like it’s Morse’s fault. “Dr. Andrews' archive has close ties to my department; we’ve worked together often. Dr. Postmartin ought to have notified me directly to begin with.”

And has done so now, presumably.

In the collaborative spirit Bright so prizes, Morse resolves to be equally opaque in return. “The incident was accompanied by some general disturbance, sir. I understand we received multiple calls about it. The loss, if there’s been one, wasn’t immediately apparent.”

“So Harold told me.” Nightingale pauses. “You said _if_ there’s been a loss. What makes you think there wasn’t?”

“The scene was very confused, sir, and even Postmartin was hesitant to say for certain that the manuscript is missing. It’s rather difficult to know anything until the books are properly reshelved.”

“Mr. Bright says you haven’t filed any kind of formal report yet. Is that why?”

Morse nods. “If you’re here to take the case over, sir, you’ll be wanting WPC Trewlove as well. She handled the bulk of the witness statements yesterday while I was examining the scene.”

“And where’s she?”

\-------

Trewlove is in the wrong line of work, she’s decided. There are jobs these days, more and more all the time, that will let a girl wear trousers in winter; policing isn’t one of them. The radio says it’ll never get out of the single digits today--Fahrenheit, even--and even with heavy dark wool stockings over her usual nylon she can barely feel her legs. Or her fingers, seeing as she can’t write tickets with mittens on.

Luckily she’s almost done her rounds for the morning, and Dr. Andrews' drab little cottage is only a street or two out of her way. She can go round and hopefully catch Morse on his way in or out, see how he’s faring. And then--hot tea, she promises herself. The oversized flask of tea she brought with her this morning has long since run dry, but there’s a cafe nearby that knows her; they’ll top her up if she asks nicely.

She finds no sign of Morse at Andrews' house, not even a disturbance in the frost on the little stone path up to the front door. Trewlove presses the doorbell; there’s no ring inside, but doorbells break so easily. She taps on the cold glass instead. “Dr. Andrews?” she calls through the door. “City Police. Just checking that you’re all right.”

The house is silent. Trewlove reflects that she’d hate, personally, to have some overeager WPC hammering down her own door if she were laid up with the flu. The poor woman’s probably hoping to sleep right through til spring.

“Doctor? Are you home?” she calls, one more time, and knocks more emphatically.

The door creaks ominously, wobbles, and falls inward with a crash of glass.

Trewlove yelps and skitters a step back, leather soles slipping on the paving stones. The leaded glass is smashed into bits, but so are the lock and the hinges, both so cold that the metal has shattered. She sidles through the doorway, avoiding shards of glass and steel as best she can.

The house is as cold and silent inside as out, but Trewlove’s bare hand bumps against an inconveniently placed radiator just past the door, and she feels a shock of heat. She jerks away and rubs at her fingers, which immediately begin to sting. “Dr. Andr--?”

Dr. Andrews is behind her on the settee, bundled up in her sick-day nest of blankets, used tissue, Vicks, and half-finished teacups. Her eyes are closed in peaceful sleep. She’s as still and bluish pale as marble.

\-------

“Oh, dear,” says DCI Nightingale, rubbing his hand over his face. “Poor Gretchen.”

Morse feels himself soften towards the man fractionally, if only on a personal basis. “Did you know her well, sir?”

“Largely by correspondence, but I thought of her as a friend, yes.” Nightingale glances around the room. Dr. DeBryn is still crouched by the body; Morse knows from experience he’s nothing to say to them yet. Trewlove is perched on a windowsill, deep in thought, still huddled into her coat even though the room is gradually warming up.

“Trewlove,” says Morse pointedly.

“Morse!” She jerks upright to look at him, takes in Nightingale at his side, and lifts her eyebrows in question.

Morse leads the way across the room. “DCI Nightingale, this is WPC Trewlove. Constable Trewlove, DCI Nightingale.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir.” Trewlove unearths one hand from her coat pocket long enough to shake hands gingerly with Nightingale. Three of her fingers have been wrapped neatly together with fresh gauze.

“All right, Trewlove?” says Morse.

She follows his glance. “Just knocked into the radiator. Dr. DeBryn wrapped it up, says it’s nothing to worry about.”

“I understand you found Dr. Andrews' body, Constable,” Nightingale says, a little gentler than strictly necessary.

Trewlove smiles in mechanical acknowledgement, as she generally does when senior male officers are unnecessarily gentle with her. “It was half pursuing inquiries, half wellness check, sir. An older woman on her own, you know, ill and not answering her phone.”

“So naturally you charged the door,” says Morse.

Her smile warms a fraction. “Needs must.”

Dr. DeBryn clears his throat as he joins them. “She’d been ill all right. Visible inflammation in the facial tissues and joints indicates that, and I imagine bloodwork will confirm it. The severe cold complicates my ability to specify a time of death, but she’s been dead since yesterday at least. I don’t see any call for a full PM, unless you know something I don’t.”

Morse experiences a vertigo-inducing suspicion that he knows nothing whatsoever. It passes in an instant.

Certainly the situation doesn’t feel right, but there’s nothing he can point to that will justify cutting this woman open. “Something must have gone wrong with the furnace for a day or two,” he says uneasily. “And in this weather--”

Dr. DeBryn shakes his head in mournful agreement. “I’ll tell them they can take her now.”

“I’d like to look through the rest of the house,” Nightingale announces, and walks away into the hallway. The stump-stump-stump of his walking stick trails first into the kitchen, and then up the stairs.

“We ought to have come by yesterday,” says Trewlove, watching DeBryn follow Nightingale out of the room. “That man Postmartin wasn’t telling us anything. We should have come here and spoken to her straight away.”

“I wish we had.” Morse takes a seat on the windowsill next to her. “But for all we knew, she’d be right back at work tomorrow. You did your best with what you knew.”

“Thanks.”

“About that door,” Morse begins.

“Not as exciting as it looks, I’m afraid. It fell right in when I knocked.”

“Metal does shatter, you know, when it’s cold enough. Perhaps all our front doors will be falling off soon if this weather keeps up.”

“Perhaps.” She’s gone distant again, which is just as well, because he doesn’t believe himself either.

“Something bothering you, Trewlove?”

“I--” She pauses and shakes her head. “Nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing. Who’s this DCI Nightingale, then?”

“DCI Nightingale heard about the break-in at the Bodleian and is kindly visiting from the Met to give us the benefit of his specialized knowledge. Whatever exactly that is.”

“You don’t trust him.”

“Senior officer his age, drives out here on a trivial case without even a bagman to do his legwork, and Bright defers to him instantly.” Morse tilts his head, listening to the thump, thump, thump of a cane upstairs. “I’m not sure I believe he’s police at all.”

\-------

“ _Is the plague still going round?_ ” asks Strange.

“It might never stop at this rate.” Morse is, in fact, talking to him on Thursday’s phone, because Thursday was still unavailable to pick up when Strange tried to report in. He peers around the corner at Bright’s office; he’s been in there with Nightingale for a while. “How’s Reading?”

“ _Two inches of snow last night,_ ” says Strange glumly. “ _Still a tropical paradise compared to Oxford, or so I hear._ ”

“And you’re the only man in history to ever call it that. Any luck finding that boy’s family?”

“ _I’m making progress. Think he came here from somewhere else, though, might’ve been bouncing around the country for a bit._ ”

Strange was sent out last week to a drowning in the Cherwell; there’s been no sign of foul play, but the only clue to the young man’s origins was a one-way rail ticket from Reading. Strange has talked Bright, somehow, into letting him travel up in person to clear it up rather than sending a photo to the Berkshire Constabulary and letting them handle it.

“ _I can’t very well go on backtracking him forever,_ ” Strange goes on. “ _But the lad must have people somewhere who’d want to know what’s happened to him._ ” He sighs, a crackle over the line. “ _You doing all right? Rattling around the place by yourself._ ”

Morse isn’t, quite. It’s not that he minds having his solitude back, if only temporarily; it’s that he’s so newly moved in that he still feels like an intruder in Strange’s flat. He doesn’t see any point in admitting it. “I’m making do. Hang on--”

Bright’s emerged from his office, finally, and frowns in question. “It’s Strange, sir,” says Morse. “Trying to get through to Thursday.”

“Tell him to call me in fifteen minutes. In the meantime, if you please--” Bright nods towards his own office.

Morse passes the word along. “I know you’ll do the best you can by that boy,” he adds.

“ _Course, matey,_ ” says Strange, “ _mind how you go,_ ” and hangs up.

Morse puts his head in next door. They’re both there this time, Bright behind his desk and Nightingale sitting in front of it. “Ah,” says Bright. “Morse. I wanted to tell you that I’ll be loaning you to DCI Nightingale while he’s here. Does that work for everybody?”

If anything, it’s a relief; Nightingale’s been so uncommunicative that Morse expected to be taken off the investigation altogether. “Of course, sir. Although I’d like to keep Constable Trewlove as well.”

“I did mean to ask,” says Bright. “Where exactly have you sent her?”

“Trewlove’s offered to put in some time helping Postmartin get his books and his catalogue in order. We feel the faster it gets done, the sooner we’ll know for sure what’s gone missing.” It’s not a lie, after all, but Trewlove’s easily mistaken for a soft touch, and with luck Postmartin will be more open with her about the nature of his work than he’s likely to be with Morse.

Somebody snorts. It takes a moment for Morse to realize that Nightingale is repressing a smile. “That’s very kind of her, I’m sure. May we speak outside, Sergeant?”

“I’ll be with you in a moment, if that’s all right.” Morse waits for Nightingale to leave the room--the man moves fairly well, despite his age and the cane--and turns back to Bright. “Sir. What is _happening_?”

“I’m really not sure myself,” says Bright. “But I’ve been strictly told to accommodate him. So do try and humour the man, won’t you?”

“Oh, you know me, sir. Buttering up senior officers left and right.”

“I do know you,” says Bright. “I know that I can rely on you to do your job thoroughly and accurately. Whatever--peculiar complications may be inflicted on you.”

“Ah,” says Morse, and flees the room before he has to admit to himself that he’s pleased.

\-------

It’s the middle of the afternoon when Trewlove exits the Radcliffe Camera. The cold air hits her like a wall, and she flinches and pulls her scarf higher over her stinging cheeks.

The university isn’t so much holiday-quiet today as desolate. The spires of Oxford seem wholly frosted over, glittering and pale. It would be prettier if her eyes didn’t hurt from the cold. She blinks rapidly and shakes her head as she crosses the lawn, glancing up at the Sheldonian, which has been made ludicrous by icicles hanging from the statues atop it.

Naturally, in the split second she’s not looking, somebody knocks into her.

“Oh!” the other woman says. “I’m so sorry, dear, I should have been looking.”

“That’s all right,” says Trewlove. “I was the one who wasn’t looking, ma’am.” Though she hesitates; it’s hard to judge the age of someone even more bundled up than she is. A few wisps of salt-and-pepper hair are escaping from under the woman’s hat, but there are no lines around her sparkling dark eyes.

She doesn’t seem to object to the _ma’am_ , at least. “You’re a policewoman, aren’t you? Your hat,” she adds, with a hint of apology.

“WPC Trewlove, ma’am. Can I help you?”

“Oh, thank goodness. You see--my name’s Isis, by the way, how do you do--you see, I’m a friend of Gretchen Andrews', isn’t it dreadful? And I thought perhaps, being a policewoman, you could tell me something more about what happened to her.”

“I’m very sorry about your friend,” says Trewlove. “But I’m afraid there’s nothing I can tell you.”

“I might not have thought there was anything more to tell, Constable, only I hear that the Nightingale’s in town. And he doesn’t exactly go about making social calls these days, does he?” Isis’s eyes are still smiling through the gap between hat and muffler. 

Trewlove blinks down at her, baffled. “I really don’t know what you mean, ma’am.”

“Well, if you get the chance, tell him I’m here visiting my husband’s brother, and he’s welcome to come round for a call.” Isis pats Trewlove’s arm and looks around. “It’s very pretty, isn’t it, in the winter? Like a storybook. If only it wasn’t so quiet.”

\-------

She tells Nightingale when she returns to the station, but it’s unclear whether he’s fully paying attention; he unceremoniously herds her and Morse into Thursday’s office and says “I think, in light of Gretchen’s death, it’s past time I told you what brought me here.”

Trewlove sits down, obligingly. At the corner of her vision Morse leans back against the office window, arms folded.

Nightingale takes the other chair, angling it to face them both before he seats himself and says: “Around the year 1700, Isaac Newton published a second _Principia_. He called it _Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Artes Magicisi,_ and it codified and formalized magic as it was practiced in Britain. I expect you’ll have seen it in Harold’s archive by now, Constable.”

Trewlove nods. “He has about twenty. Most of them with commentary, like editions of Shakespeare.”

“Oh, for God’s _sake,_ ” says Morse. “Sir.”

Trewlove stifles a smile, more at the familiarity of his scorn than from sharing in it.

“I don’t believe our time is best spent debating the legitimacy of magic, Sergeant,” says Nightingale, perfectly level. “But many people in the past centuries have taken it very seriously indeed. Enough scholars, as you’ve seen, to fill Harold’s shelves and more. And many more people who would, if asked, earnestly describe themselves as wizards who practice magic according to the principles Newton laid out.”

“Well,” says Morse after a moment. “That would explain why he’s been so squirrelly about it.”

Nightingale smiles. “I do have the impression he wasn’t clear on how much he ought to tell you. I’ve told him he can relax; it’s not as if it was classified. Per se.”

Trewlove contemplates him; he seems serious enough about all of it. “And where exactly do you come into it, sir?”

“As you might imagine, people who believe they can do magic are prone to doing some very irrational and dangerous things. It happens often enough that I’ve made a career out of specializing in them.” And of talking around things he thinks will make people stop listening, Trewlove notes to herself. “I would have said, a week ago, that Gretchen Andrews was Britain’s leading expert on magical scholarship; without her I’d say Harold and I are about even.”

“So you think the manuscript was stolen by someone who thinks they’re a wizard,” she says, hoping she’s missed a step somewhere.

“What would someone want papers like that for?” Morse asks, only somewhat grudgingly.

“It’s hard to say without knowing what de Beaumont wrote,” says Nightingale. “Which may be why Gretchen was killed; unlike Harold, she would have known exactly what was in them. But based on experience, I’d say someone in Oxford thinks de Beaumont was onto something that would make them extremely powerful.”

“You said killed,” says Morse, with a definite note of interest now. “Dr. DeBryn called it death by exposure.”

“Oh, it was,” says Nightingale. “Someone else was in the house; I found signs of disturbance, papers moved around. The furnace was interfered with. A postmortem would have proven nothing; we’ll need to find another way to show that it was murder.”

“We did think it didn’t feel right,” says Trewlove, looking sidelong at Morse. Her healing fingers itch; she rubs absently at the gauze, which is starting to fray around the edges. Due for a change, most likely.

She wonders why exactly Nightingale is so willing to cry murder on the strength of a few messy papers.

“Sir,” says Morse. “You said Dr. Andrews was your friend. If she was murdered, are you sure you’re the right man to handle it?”

“Of course not,” says Nightingale. “That’s why I need the two of you.”

\-------

Morse vanishes the moment Nightingale leaves the station for the night. Trewlove clears up some paperwork, changes out of uniform, and finds him exactly where she expects to: in the back corner of the nearest pub, halfway through a pint.

“I hate this winter,” she says, sitting down opposite him. “Back in, what, ‘63? When it got bad at least we had snow, we had wind sometimes. This is--I don’t know. I just don’t like it.” Her cheeks are stinging and sore, and she’s only had a few minutes’ walk.

“Let me enjoy the blessing which a rough winter offers,” says Morse sepulchrally to his glass. “The winds and waves have more of justice than you.”

If he’s come here to oil the gears of his brain, he’s clearly oiled them a little too well already, and Trewlove refuses to give him the satisfaction of asking what the hell he’s on about. “Maybe I’d better report back tomorrow.”

“No, no, it’s all right.” Morse sits up straighter. “Just been woolgathering. How's it going with Postmartin?”

“We’re making good progress. The books are still in heaps on the floor, but I’ve got most of the card catalogue back in order. “

“Keep an eye on him for the moment.” says Morse. “If whoever stole the manuscripts killed Dr. Andrews, it was likely someone she knew. Anyone who was familiar enough with the collection to know what they were after--she would have to have known him, been friends, maybe.”

“You don’t think _Postmartin_ \--” Trewlove’s mouth twists. “I don’t see why he would bother. He’d essentially be stealing from himself, wouldn’t he?”

“That’s what I can’t work out,” Morse admits. “He’s got all the opportunity in the world to steal from the archive, but that’s just why he’d need to. He already has unlimited, uninterrupted access to everything; I don’t see why he’d need to remove any papers, let alone report the theft. No one would have known the difference otherwise.”

“Except Dr. Andrews,” says Trewlove.

“Except,” Morse admits, “Dr. Andrews. But he isn’t acting like a killer, is he? Or even a thief.”

“I’ll keep an eye,” says Trewlove again. “You could come round and have a look tomorrow, maybe, see what you make of the collection.”

“I think I will,” says Morse.

“It’s all more or less like Nightingale said, you know. The whole collection--or at least the French, and what Latin and German I can puzzle out. As best I can tell it’s all spellbooks and bestiaries and so on, occult stuff. Not that I’ve looked in any of the books, really, I’ve been busy just with the cards.”

“First ghosts, now wizards.” Morse grimaces. “What do you make of him? Nightingale.”

“I think he knows something important he doesn’t care to tell us. But the furnace--” Trewlove splays her burned hand on the table between them, wiggles her fingers thoughtfully, and winces at the inevitable sting in her knuckles.

“What about it?”

“When I got there, the radiator was on,” says Trewlove slowly, trying to trace her line of thought. “Hot enough to burn me, like it had been on full the whole time. But the house was freezing--maybe even colder than outside.”

“Someone might have turned the furnace back on when they were sure she was dead,” says Morse, but he immediately catches himself. “No, that’s nonsense; a killer would leave it off if they wanted us to think her death was an accident.”

“And the house would have warmed up gradually along with the radiator,” says Trewlove. “I think--well, I don’t know how it was done, and I don’t know how Nightingale thinks it was done. But I’d swear nothing was ever wrong with that furnace.”

“And yet she froze to death,” says Morse. “With the heat on full blast. A hell of a grim magic trick.”

“Are you sure that’s all it is? Trickery.”

“Of course. Someone’s bored, and spiteful, and likes seeing us run in circles.” He eyes her suspiciously. “Do you actually think _magic--_ ”

“It’s just all very odd, is all.” Trewlove shrugs. “And I don’t think you feel right about it either.”

“Don’t I,” says Morse, expression gone flat.

Trewlove glances at his glass, and then back at him. “If you don’t think there’s anything in it, then what are you back here sulking about?”

“I’m not sulking.” He sits back in his chair, stretching his legs out in front of him, as if this will somehow emphasise the point. “But I can’t see where the trick is, and I don’t like it.”

\-------

“Win, darling,” Thursday begins, before he’s startled into a coughing fit. “Oh for God’s sake, Trewlove, you’re learning bad habits from Morse. Go away and tell him I’m in no fit state to detect things.”

Trewlove sets tea and dry toast down on Thursday’s end table. “And good morning to you too, sir. How’s your flu?”

“Beastly,” says Thursday, with hoarse passion, and sits up on the sofa to reach for his tea. “Might be the end of me. Good morning, Constable.”

“I was hoping to ask you something, sir.”

Thursday pulls his dressing gown tighter around himself and sniffs tragically. “Peas in a pod, you two, anyway. Curious as cats, nothing but trouble”

“We haven’t made any trouble,” says Trewlove. “Really.”

Thursday glares at her over his teacup. “Well, ask what you need to, for the five minutes I can stay awake.”

Trewlove sits down on the arm of the sofa, folding her hands in her lap. “When you were at the Yard, did you ever work with a DCI Nightingale?”

“Never had the pleasure. And thank God for that.”

“But you know of him.”

“He’s stuck his nose into this Bodleian business, has he? Bright mentioned as much.” Thursday sniffs. “Oh, we all knew something about him in the Smoke. He used to get some new jawbreaker name for his department every couple of years, but the rest of us called him the Weird Bollocks Department, begging your pardon, Constable, and he called it some other daft thing. The Folly, I think.”

“But is he all right?” Trewlove presses. “As a copper.”

“One of the sharpest men around, I hear, even at his age.” Thursday takes another gulp of tea. “The word was, you didn’t want the kind of case Nightingale’d turn up for, but if you had one you were a thousand times better off with him than without.” Thursday eyes her narrowly. “Is there something I should know about, Constable?”

Trewlove hesitates. “I’ll let you know, sir.”

“If you say so.” Thursday looks unconvinced, but he falls victim to another coughing fit, which Trewlove patiently waits out. “And you can’t go on investigating your supervising officers like they’re suspects, Trewlove. That way lies all kinds of trouble.”

\-------

“What was she like?” Trewlove asks. “Dr. Andrews. Did she have family?”

One aisle over, Morse pricks up his ears. He’s been leafing through a copy of _Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Artes Magicisi;_ it’s largely rot, of course, but still underlaid with Newton’s brilliant implacable logic. He’s finding it strangely compelling.

“Does it matter?” says Postmartin glumly. “Nightingale thinks it was a practitioner who--well.”

“I’d just like to know,” says Trewlove gently. “You don’t have to talk about it.”

“Sorry,” says Postmartin. He sounds a little pinched still. “There isn’t much to tell, really. She didn’t talk about family much. We got on well here, but didn’t exactly socialize outside of work; I don’t think she had much else. Widowed in the war, you know, and threw herself into her work after that. She did--I know she had a nephew she was close to. He came up to make, well. The arrangements for her.” The phone on his desk rings, and he says “Excuse me--” with distinct relief. “All right, Thomas,” he goes on after a few moments. There’s a rattle as he hangs up; then he raises his voice to call across the room to them: “Inspector Nightingale’s coming round in an hour; I need to look for some records I said I’d show him, if you don’t mind.”

“I can carry on alone here for a bit,” Trewlove offers. The books are in order, of a kind, but mostly in stacks in the aisles. “Not often I get this kind of peace and quiet on the job.”

“Upstairs, you said?” Morse considers the _Principia_ , then collects his wits; it’s fascinating, but doesn’t strike him as immediately helpful. He reshelves it with regret. “I’ll meet you, I think.”

As appealing as the books are, what he finds he really wants is another look around those tunnels. Someone carried a stack of manuscripts out of there _somehow_ , even if no one on either end of the Link saw them, and Morse wants to know what other ways out the place is hiding.

There are, of course, the stairs up which he once pursued Mason Gull, but he wasn’t exactly stopping to map his route at the time. Morse works his way around the outer wall of the stacks until he finds the exit, but it seems to have fallen out of use; the stairwell is miserably dusty, and when he tries the door there’s a loud rattle like it’s chained shut from the outside.

Out on the street, someone laughs nervously and retreats with a hasty patter of footsteps. Morse smiles ruefully to himself and wonders what ghost story he’s just fueled.

He spends the rest of the hour exploring the side tunnel that connects Postmartin’s archive to the main Link, drawing a careful little map in his notebook by the light of a pocket torch. It only branches twice, and one is a dead end, coated in years of dust.

The other side tunnel is dusty, too, but the dust has been trampled over and stirred up recently. Morse follows it, stifling a cough, but finds no exit, not even a trapdoor in the ceiling. It only leads to a storage room like a janitor’s cupboard--recently in use, but not by a janitor. A few stolen chair cushions have been stacked in one corner, and a lone cardboard file box sits beside them. Morse lifts the lid: a few Crunchies, two unopened bottles of fizzy lemonade, half a packet of stale digestives, and a discolored apple core. There’s a stack of abstracted library books on the shelf next to it, which Morse conscientiously reclaims, but he notes the contents of the box and puts it back.

It’s just the kind of hideout a child would put together, and Morse thinks again of the purported ghost. If a particularly inquisitive flesh-and-blood girl has found a way in here from the street, he reflects, someone with worse motives might easily have used it to carry stolen papers out. “But how are you getting in?” he asks the empty room. “And for God’s sake, why down here, of all places?”

He leaves the books on the ground floor desk with a note, and then goes on upstairs to meet the others.

The reading room upstairs is nearly as desolate as the tunnels downstairs. There’s no rustle of papers elsewhere in the space, no murmur of students or staff. The light streaming through the windows is sharp-edged and silvery, and in it Nightingale looks older and more tired than ever. “Well, Harold, I’ve spent the morning calling on what few regulars you have. Most of them are still gone for the vac, and the few I found at home don’t strike me as active practitioners.”

“I thought not,” says Postmartin. “Just curious, most of them.”

“But we have worked out what’s missing, sir,” Trewlove offers.

Postmartin opens an enormous ledger on the table between them. The older pages, Morse sees as he rifles through it, are yellowed and crumbling around the edges, the script antiquated but growing more familiar as he flips forward. “Gretchen never said anything to me about it--perhaps she had no deliberate plans--but it seems the _Treatise_ we recently acquired was part of a set of manuscripts she had been accumulating for going on forty years, since well before my time. Seven in total, all volumes of the same title; the recent acquisition I was working on would have been the third of seven.”

“Who was keeping track of your acquisitions?” asks Morse. “They might have been waiting for the set to be complete.”

“Besides me and Gretchen--” Postmartin shrugs. “The library has never kept a particularly close eye on the details of our work. I can’t say I paid much mind to de Beaumont myself until this week. But you can see the record, here.” He points at a recent ledger entry. “It came in with a batch of books found under a loose floorboard in a French farmhouse, stashed during the war, most likely. The present owners only moved in around 1950, so I couldn’t speak too well to provenance, but there was no sign of forgery.”

Paper rustles somewhere out of sight, the most ordinary of library sounds, but for some reason Nightingale seems distracted by it. “I don’t suppose you have a good idea of the book’s contents, Harold? I’ve telephoned the Folly; we don’t have anything by de Beaumont there. Whatever he wrote, there seem to be no copies besides yours.”

“I have turned up some pages.” Postmartin produces an oversized file folder and sets it on top of the ledger, cracking it open an inch. It’s full of photographic enlargements. “Gretchen felt a few years ago that parts of these manuscripts were past preserving, so she had them photographed before they could disintegrate too far. It should give some idea of what de Beaumont was up to. I’ll examine them as soon as I can, but I’m afraid that even with Constable Trewlove’s help the cleanup work before me is rather overwhelming.”

“I’d be happy to go through them myself, if you’ll allow the loan.” Morse reaches for the folder.

Paper rustles again in the next alcove over, accompanied by a less expected crackling noise and then an odd, metallic creak. It occurs to Morse that that alcove was empty when he passed it earlier, and he hasn’t heard any footsteps since. “Excuse me,” says Trewlove, perhaps thinking the same, and leaves her seat to take a look. Morse, wishing nothing better than to be left alone with these photographs, has to force himself to keep his eyes up as she disappears around a bookshelf and then, a moment later, takes a step backwards into view. “Inspector!”

Morse gets up, leaving the photographs still unexamined on the table, but even before he’s cleared the alcove he can see what’s wrong. The frost has crept in from outside and is spreading over the carpet and bookshelves towards them like a rising tide. The window above their table is freezing over rapidly, crackling with the strain as frost covers it and muffles the light from outside.

“Oh my God,” says Postmartin, scrambling backwards to join Morse and Trewlove by the gallery railing. “What do we--”

“Constable,” says Nightingale sharply. “Go see if anyone else is here,” and Trewlove sets off around the gallery, wincing at the cold as she looks into each aisle.

A freezing wind whips round the gallery, tumbling books off shelves, whisking Nightingale’s hat away from where he left it on the table.. It really is remarkably like _The Wizard of Oz_ , Morse acknowledges, and then he realizes the wind is lifting up and scattering--

“Damn it!” He leaps for the photographs. He’s gathering them into a rough pile when the tall window above him cracks and shatters loudly. Morse ducks, throwing an arm over his head.

Nothing happens.

After a few seconds, Morse uncovers his face and looks up. The window’s smashed to bits, all right, but the shards are floating in a glittering cloud above his head, harmless. Morse stares up at it.

“In your own time, Sergeant,” says Nightingale, faintly amused.

Morse adjusts his grip on the stack of photographs and backs away, keeping an eye on the broken glass; only once he’s safely out of range does it collapse into a neat little heap on top of the table. The wind is dying down, and the bitter cold soaking through the building is coming very naturally from the broken window.

“There’s no one else up here,” says Trewlove, who’s completed her circuit and rejoined them. “Maybe we’d better go somewhere warmer.” Her voice barely trembles at all. Beside her, Postmartin’s face is chalk-white.

\--------

“I did tell you,” Nightingale says afterwards, “that there are men in England who fancy themselves as wizards.”

He, Morse, and Trewlove have regrouped among the carrels that ring the center of the ground floor. Postmartin, rather shaken, has fled to the windowless safety of his office.

Morse suspects he’s being made fun of; he can’t be sure he hasn’t earned it. “You neglected to mention you were one of them.”

Nightingale frowns at him. “I’ve found, from hard experience, that I’m often less likely to be believed the more honest I am.”

“You’d better tell us, sir,” says Trewlove.

Morse glances at her, but she’s reverted to polite but unhelpful blankness. “Much as I’d prefer to go on living in a rational world, sir,” he says, dropping into a chair, “I’d rather be wrong than not know.”

“Good show.” Nightingale smiles with startling warmth, but only for a moment; then it fades. “Then, in the interests of forthrightness--I am a wizard, yes. The only one left in Britain, at least officially. I can demonstrate now, under calmer circumstances, if you’d like.”

It’s a rhetorical inquiry. He takes one hand off the head of his cane, opens his palm upwards, and reveals a small round light glowing there, like a miniature sun. Morse thinks for a moment, reflexively, about wires up sleeves--but then the light drifts up out of Nightingale’s hand to hover in midair between them.

“How?” says Trewlove quietly. It’s the only question, really.

“I’m afraid no one has ever answered that,” says Nightingale. He closes his fist, and the light winks out. “Newton described how magic behaves, but not why--much as with gravity, I suppose. I once knew a man who might have worked it out, or at least come close, but he’s long gone.”

Morse swallows, staring at the empty spot where the impossible light hung. “Everything else you told us about Postmartin’s archive--the books there--they really could make someone immensely powerful, then? It isn’t just some delusion.”

“Someone who knew how to use them, yes.”

Morse recalls, belatedly, his best--if still shabby--theory. “Is Dr. Postmartin like you?”

“A practitioner? God, no, not Harold; his knowledge is all theoretical.” Which takes care of that, or seems to. “Other dabblers crop up from time to time, usually dangerously undertrained; it’s what keeps me in a job. But whoever took the manuscripts, and is trying to keep us from finding out what they say, is not a dabbler. He’s known exactly what he was after from the start.”

“So,” says Morse, desperate for a practical question to ask. “How do we go about finding him?”

“I’m afraid I’m out of ideas,” Nightingale confesses. “There was a lingering signature of magic done in the stacks and at Gretchen’s house, and I felt it again upstairs just now. But there’s a faint whiff of it all over the city; I can’t seem to pin it to an individual. It does remind me--the Russians trained witches in combat magic during the war, and they had a particular fondness for weaponizing cold and ice. But I’ve found no sign of any in Oxfordshire.”

“I don’t suppose this is why the weather’s been so awful,” says Trewlove.

Her tone is light, but Nightingale appears to take her seriously. “A lone human practitioner wouldn’t be strong enough to change the weather in a whole city; I certainly couldn’t. Though I suppose, with access to a great enough external power source--”

“What kind of power source?” Morse prompts, but Nightingale has subsided into thought. “Sir?”

“Animal sacrifice is a popular option,” says Nightingale, with a touch of grim humor. “Historically speaking.”

“Or human?” says Trewlove. She meets Morse’s glance, sidelong; he wonders if she, too, is thinking of Bramford Mere.

“Also historically popular,” Nightingale acknowledges. “But it’s a difficult thing to practice methodically without being noticed, and there are no signs anyone’s doing it around here, thank God.”

Fresh out of suggestions for the moment, Morse sits back and groans. Trewlove’s gone quiet and stricken next to him. He takes a moment to look at Nightingale and think _wizard_ , synthesize the idea with the man in front of him. It’s easier to wrap his head round that, somehow, than the sideways shift of the whole world.

\-------

Morse dives into Postmartin’s photographs in a manner so like a starving dog that Trewlove, although curious herself, elects to stay at the library until he calms down enough to be communicative. It isn’t difficult; Postmartin still has an overwhelming amount of reshelving that needs an extra pair of hands, and every unharmed book Trewlove puts away frees him to repair the ones that were damaged when they were blown off the shelves.

“You must be used to this kind of thing,” she says, crouching to shuffle a fresh stack of books into her arms. “Doing this job.”

“You’d think so,” says Postmartin. “But until recently--until I saw what happened to the stacks out there--I didn’t think any of it was true. Not really. All these years knowing Gretchen and Nightingale, reading these books, meeting people who claimed they were rivers, of all the damn things. I suppose I thought it was just some big peculiar joke.”

“Rivers?” says Trewlove, baffled.

Postmartin laughs bitterly; he doesn’t hear, or doesn’t acknowledge, her confusion. “For God’s sake, this is Oxford; a thousand people in this city must be writing books about magic. How was I supposed to know half of them are true?”

“Less than half, I hope.” Trewlove slides her armload of books onto a shelf with perhaps unnecessary precision. “It might get confusing otherwise.”

Postmartin’s laugh comes a little easier this time. “I must say, you don’t seem particularly shaken up.”

Trewlove pauses on her way past his chair; there’s a stale digestive on a paper plate there, seemingly abandoned on the corner of his desk. “Did you still want this?”

Postmartin blinks at it. “Oh, that? It--well, it isn’t mine exactly. Gretchen used to leave one out. For the ghost, she said. I thought she’d want me to go on doing it.”

Trewlove leaves the plate there, all the same. “Do the biscuits ever disappear?”

“Maybe Gretchen’s did, but mine haven’t lately.” Postmartin shrugs. “Leave it--I’ll throw it out in the morning and put another out fresh.”

\-------

She successfully keeps her hands full until past eight, and then finally steels her nerves and goes back to the station to say hello. Unsurprisingly, CID is deserted except for Morse; more surprisingly, he’s humming something complex to himself as he takes notes. Verdi, she thinks, but she isn’t sure.

In the abstract, Trewlove knows that Morse sings, and that he must be good at it. She’s never heard him, though; she doesn’t think anyone in the station has, even the Thursdays. Certainly none of them ever go to TOSCA performances. It’s a piece of himself that Morse holds carefully apart from his work whenever he can, and listening to even his absent-minded humming makes Trewlove uneasy.

She clears her throat, and he starts and goes quiet. “Trewlove? I was sure you’d gone home for the night.”

To apologize would be to acknowledge that the intrusion happened at all; better not, Trewlove decides. “I thought I’d see how you were getting on.”

“Postmartin didn’t exaggerate when he said it was peculiar,” says Morse, turning a page sideways and squinting at it. “It reads like a fever dream, and none of it runs in a straight line. But it’s too methodical a fever dream. Planned out.” The lines of writing he’s studying veer off wildly in curves and around corners, but she can see that it’s all arranged with care to fill the page, lines never overlapping or wobbling.

Trewlove picks up another page and turns it in her hands to follow the writing, which runs in neat parallel curves like a piece cut out of a dartboard. “--been here centuries,” she translates in a murmur, squinting at the cramped old script, “for millennia. I have been here all my life, and my life has been too long. I am forgetting myself. The cold comes and goes, and each time takes a little more, but sometimes-- “ The line runs off the edge of the page.“Cheery stuff. Did they have LSD in 1758, do you know?”

“Oh, people have always made do. You should see what ergot was doing to Greek literature a few millennia before that.”

Trewlove perches on a few bare inches of his desk. “Are we going to talk about it?”

Morse looks up warily. “The case? I believe we’re talking about it right now.”

“You know what.” 

He pauses for a long moment. “There’s rules to this magic stuff,” he says at last. “At least the way Nightingale explains it; there’s still a system to the world, Trewlove, just not quite what I thought. That’s something I can get my head around. More or less.”

“Whatever makes it easiest, I suppose.”

“Whereas you’ve taken this very calmly from the start.” Morse’s distant gaze sharpens on her. “Do you know, I got a very strange phone call this afternoon.”

“Really,” says Trewlove. “What about?”

“County records,” says Morse. “About a call you made on my behalf three days ago. They’d looked into it, and they were sorry to disappoint, but there was no record of any children dying in the underground areas of the Bodleian, or anywhere else on the premises. Which is strange, because I don’t recall asking you to make a call like that.”

“I’m sorry,” says Trewlove. “I thought it wouldn’t hurt if I just made sure.”

“I would have said, three days ago, that there was no reason to take the idea of a haunting seriously. I’m not convinced there is now, and you’ve never struck me as the superstitious type.” Morse leans back in his chair and studies her. “Is there something you know that I don’t, Trewlove?”

“I’d tell you if it was relevant to the case,” says Trewlove, uneasy.

“I know you would.” But Morse sets his pen down and lifts his eyebrows hopefully. “I never mind a good story, though.”

Trewlove wheels Strange’s chair around and deposits it beside Morse’s desk, with a clatter that echoes uncomfortably in the empty room. She sits a moment, deciding, and then begins: “My mum and her brother, my uncle Harry, they grew up on a farm, and there was a boy next door who used to come over and play with them when they were little. Only one night, when it was raining, he never made it home. They found him next morning down the bottom of my grandparents’ well. He’d slipped in the dark, fell in, and drowned.” Trewlove twirls Morse’s pen, watching it gleam between her fingers. “They dug a whole new well after that, and covered up the old one, so when I was a kid, visiting on holidays, it was just this old mossy pile of rocks. No one ever talked about it, because it wasn’t the kind of story you tell little girls, right? But--”

“But?”

“My sisters and I,” says Trewlove, “we didn’t know about that little boy, but we’d never go near the thing. Because all of us, one time or another--we’d all heard someone under there. A little kid just crying and crying.”

“I’m sorry,” says Morse. Even as he says it, he looks like he knows that it isn’t quite the right thing, but then again, what would be? “So the idea that the Bodleian might be haunted--that didn’t seem so strange to you after all.”

“Not particularly, no.” Trewlove purses her lips. “The rest of it, though, magic, the kind of things Nightingale can do--I’d never have imagined that, not in a million.”

“Why didn’t you say sooner?”

“Because I know you. You’d have wanted to pick it apart, make sense out of it. And I love a good puzzle as much as anyone, but some things--they just _are_.” Trewlove shrugs. “It seemed easier just to wait and see if you’d work your own way around.”

Morse opens his mouth and closes it. “Well,” he says, and smiles ruefully.

Trewlove laughs. “You might try going home, you know. Better enjoy having the place to yourself while you can.”

“Walk home, though? In this weather?” Morse grimaces. “Mind how you go when you go, Constable.”

The changing room downstairs is mercifully empty. Trewlove drops onto a bench and thinks about wind howling through the library, about ice creeping over the carpet towards her shoes, about a swarm of glass shards held motionless in midair. “God,” she says. “Oh, God, what the hell,” puts her head in her hands and lets herself shudder, just for a few minutes while no one can see.

\-------

Morse loses his morning and early afternoon in the happy daze of the jigsaw solver. His trance is only broken when someone attempts to open the door and hits his knee with it. “Sergeant,” says Nightingale. “Is that you in there?”

“Afternoon, sir.” Morse scrambles to his feet and out from behind the door. “Better mind your footing.”

Nightingale slips through the half-open door and surveys the photographs arrayed across the floor, spreading up onto the walls like ivy. “Good lord,” he says, navigating carefully through the gaps to claim a chair. “You weren’t at this all night, were you?”

“Of course not,” says Morse, long used to deflecting these kinds of questions from Thursday. It’s technically true; he did sleep a few hours in one of Bright’s cushioned leather chairs, mostly because the idea of going outdoors was so deeply unappealing.

“I’m glad to hear it,” says Nightingale. “And what have you come up with?”

Morse takes a seat of his own on the edge of Thursday’s abandoned desk. “Dr. Andrews had photographs taken of four of the seven de Beaumont manuscripts. Not every page of every manuscript, and some of them had already disintegrated pretty badly, so there are gaps, but I’ve seen enough to safely propose that each manuscript is in fact a single continuous line of writing, curved and bent to travel back and forth between pages. I’ve been piecing them together in order, and--as you can see--that continuous line forms, in each case, a larger pattern.”

The patterns differ from manuscript to manuscript, but they’re clear enough once laid out, each a magnificent sprawling mandala of antiquated French wound like yarn around a scattering of more obscure symbols. Any self-respecting academic, or cipher clerk, might have thoroughly annotated the margins to direct later readers from page to page, and then engaged some unfortunate typist to transcribe it. Morse, a lowly police officer with a murderer to find, has settled for it all in place. Postmartin will be appalled.

“These other symbols.” Nightingale indicates one with the iron tip of his stick. “What do you make of them?”

Morse shrugs. “I recognize some of them as alchemical, but I thought Postmartin might be more familiar. Or you, sir.”

“I am,” says Nightingale, without immediate elaboration. “And the text?”

“Hardly academic writing. It reads, at best, like a diary, and the diary of someone very ill and very afraid.”

Nightingale sits up sharply. “Afraid?”

“The texts differ, but the general idea is the same. The writer is cold, trapped, afraid. Lonely and hoping for rescue. Towards the endpoint of each there’s--rather a lot of begging and prayer, and then a descent into incoherence.”

“Not very pleasant, then.”

“No, sir. Of course I’d need a lot more time to read through them from start to finish, but I think I’ve got the idea all right.” 

“I’m sure you have.” Nightingale frowns, but before he can go on, a PC taps at the door. “DCI Nightingale? There’s a woman at the front desk looking for you. Calling herself Isis--just Isis.”

Morse looks over at Nightingale, whose face has settled into blank resignation. “Better go out and meet her,” he suggests. “No sense inflicting this lot on anybody else.”

Isis is waiting for them in the station entryway, much as Trewlove described her: a small cheerful woman with a youthful face but silver shot through her dark hair. She might be Morse’s age, or Nightingale’s, or anywhere in between. “You’ve been avoiding me, Nightingale,” she says, with no sign of real offence. “Didn’t that nice girl tell you I was asking after you?”

“I’ve been busy,” says Nightingale apologetically. “Poor Gretchen, you know--”

“Poor Gretchen, yes. But you do have other responsibilities, you know. Older ones.” Isis’s eyes flicker inquisitively to Morse. “I’ll buy you lunch, if you like, on neutral ground somewhere, free of obligation and so on.”

“I’d be honored,” says Nightingale.

Isis beams. “And bring this sergeant of yours, won’t you? The man looks like he could use a good lunch.”

“I wouldn’t want to impose,” says Morse, who wants desperately to impose.

“Oh, come along and eat, Sergeant,” says Nightingale. “She’s right; you’re past due.”

“I’ll get my coat,” says Morse. As he goes, he stops by the duty officer’s desk. “Constable Trewlove take a radio with her today?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell her, when she next stops to visit Postmartin at the Bodleian, I want everything she can give us about the provenance of those manuscripts.”

\-------

“You see, Nightingale,” says Isis later, over her soup, “I only came to visit Cher--that’s my brother-in-law, Mr. Morse--” She pronounces it _Char_ , Morse notes, like the river. ”Because he doesn’t visit often enough, and my husband’s always so occupied between the solstice and Epiphany or thereabouts, so I came alone. Just a quick hello, you know. Only I got here a few days ago and found him very ill.”

“Ill!” says Nightingale, with much more surprise than seems appropriate. “How so?”

“He’s sleeping most of the day, like a cat, and when he’s awake he shivers and babbles. You know him, Nightingale, such a bright sunny young man usually, even in the rough winters when he’s frozen over. It’s quite alarming, really, the longer it goes on.”

“There _is_ a bad flu going around,” Morse observes, testing for the gap in his understanding.

Isis stares at him like he’s talking nonsense. “Good lord, Nightingale. You really have got secretive in your old age, haven’t you? What have you been telling this poor young man?”

Not enough, Morse doesn’t say.

“Not enough, I expect,” says Nightingale. “One does get used to working alone.”

“One ought not to,” says Isis. “I know you’re determined to be the last of--well, it isn’t healthy, is it, the way you shut yourself up.”

“You all act like I’ve done it on purpose,” says Nightingale. “The magic is dying out of England whether we like it or not. It would be cruel, taking on an apprentice, imparting the forms and wisdoms of an art that may well be dead by the time his training ends.”

“Dying, fiddlesticks,” says Isis. “I think young Mama Thames would disagree--” and then she looks at Morse again, and collects herself. “In any case, you may not need apprentices, but you might try remembering you have friends once in a while.” 

“Excuse me,” says Morse, more sharply than is perhaps ideal. “Sir. Mrs.--”

“Just Isis, please.”

“Exactly what is it you’re not telling me?”

“Cher doesn’t get flu,” says Nightingale. “He can’t; he isn’t human. He’s a _genius loci_ , the living spirit of the river Cherwell, much as his brother Oxley and Father Thames are the incarnations of their own rivers.”

“And young Mama Thames,” Isis adds. “Whose association with the Old Man is purely professional. When they bother speaking at all.”

“River spirits,” says Morse flatly.

“If you like.” The words are casual enough, but Nightingale is watching him carefully.

“Excuse me.” Morse shoves his chair back. “But I think I need some air.”

It’s sunny midafternoon, but ten degrees out at best, if the radio is to be believed. Cold enough for his breath to rasp in his throat. It helps, in that the sting of every inhale confirms that he’s awake and living in the real world. A real world with wizards and river gods and God knows what else--not to mention Trewlove’s account of some thing in a well.

“Damn it,” says Morse to the street at large.“ _Damn_ it.” At least there’s no one to hear him; if anything it’s eerily quiet. He leans back against the wall and rubs at his face.

It’s the cyclists, he realizes, somewhere in the back of his mind. The iced-over streets have cleared out all the cyclists, and their jingle and clatter with them. It’s like the city is falling asleep, day by day.

Beside him, the door creaks open and shut.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Morse,” says Isis. “The Nightingale and I, we don’t quite live in the same world you do. I think we forget sometimes that it’s not so easy for other people to talk about.”

“I can’t _afford_ for it not to be easy,” Morse snaps. “I‘m not much use if I can’t work with the facts that are clearly in front of me. And the facts I’ve been given recently are hardly--digestible.”

Isis tucks her hands in her sleeves, though she doesn’t look particularly bothered by the cold. “Well, I can’t help you digest. But I’ll answer anything you like that might wash it down.”

He looks over at her and makes a conscious decision to redirect the conversation. “How long have you known him? Nightingale.”

“Oh, ages, I suppose. They used to bring all the apprentices to us--back when there were apprentices, that is. The Rivers and the Isaacs have mostly kept themselves to themselves, these past hundred years or so, but they still brought the apprentices up to Father Thames’s autumn court. It was a test for them, I think, masked as a formality. All those seventeen-year-old boys lined up in front of us pretending not to be scared out of their wits.” She smiles reminiscently.

Morse musters half a smile in return. “And Nightingale?”

“Must have been one of them.” Isis shrugs. “But I didn’t notice him particularly. Nobody knew he was going to be the last. Nobody knew there’d _be_ a last.”

This presents, to Morse’s frustration, multiple urgent questions. The constraints of human conversation force him to choose one; he goes for the most baffling. “So,” he says, still feeling out the ground before him. “Your brother in law is a--manifestation, I take it, of the Cherwell. Your husband Oxley, Father Thames, the rest of your family. Are they the same kind of--being?”

“You could say spirits, like the Nightingale, but I think there’s a bit of a silly distinction there. They’d tell you, if you asked, that they _are_ their rivers. But I can assure you--” Isis drops into a conspiratorial whisper--”that Oxley at least is very much warm flesh and blood.”

Morse coughs and decides to take her word on that point. “Then are you--”

“Am I what--oh!” Isis laughs. “Heavens, no. The Isis is still the old man’s domain. I just married into the family and fancied the name. I’ve always been fond of Oxford, you know. All those broad-shouldered rowing boys.”

“Where do they come from, then? These spirits.”

“Depends,” says Isis, fussing absently with her scarf. “Cher happened the old-fashioned way, must be, oh, going on nine hundred years ago now. But my Oxley lived a human life before he went into the river. And some just happen out of nowhere when their time is right, and what makes the time right, I couldn’t tell you.”

“What does that mean--went into the river?”

“Now that’s a very personal question to ask a lady you’ve just met,” says Isis cheerfully. “I’m surprised at you, Sergeant.”

“Why rivers, then?” Morse presses. “Of all the things in the world.”

“Oh, it isn’t just rivers. The Nightingale could tell you some dreadful stories about the Russian forests, though I don’t imagine he _would_. And I’ve heard of some of the great mountains in places like America and Japan having spirits, though they aren’t particularly sociable creatures. Even very old or very powerful human places come to life, sometimes. There was an idea at the Folly, back before the war, that there might be a spirit of the telephone exchange. Some took it more seriously than others.”

Morse snorts. “What about the University?”

“I’d believe it, but I rather hope not. He’d be insufferable, wouldn’t he?” Isis laughs. “I’m sorry, Mr. Morse; this hasn’t been a very relaxing lunch break for you, has it?”

“Oh, I don’t mind at all,” says Morse honestly. “It’s been very enlightening.”

\-------

His newfound enlightenment is of the sort that brings more questions than answers, but Nightingale departs with Isis to see her brother-in-law, so Morse and his whirling thoughts go back to the station, where he finds Trewlove aimlessly shuffling paperwork. “Duty sergeant said you’d gone out with Nightingale,” she says. "Where is he?"

"Pursuing inquiries elsewhere. I doubt we'll see him again today; you could probably go home if you like."

"Well, I got something from Postmartin that might be interesting, but I might as well explain tomorrow, when you're both here." Trewlove picks up her coat and shrugs it back on. "I think I'll go back out on wellness checks in the meantime, if they'll let me take the overtime."

"I'll come with you," says Morse. "Get you caught up, you know. And I imagine they could use the help."

\--------

“River spirits,” says Trewlove. “God, it’s one shock after another, this, isn’t it?”

“Funnily enough,” Morse admits, “it makes a kind of sense to me, now I’ve thought about it.”

Having spent two hours door-knocking their way through a block of flats, they’ve landed in the first pub that looked reasonably warm inside. It’s nearly deserted--unsettling at this time of the evening, but useful for a particularly daft conversation like this.

“How so?”

“It made me think of Matthew Laxman. That he should happen to die in such an ugly, angry way, in a place where there’d been so much death before. Having seen that--it’s not so hard to imagine that a place can remember lives and deaths. That it might take on a life of its own eventually.” Morse frowns at his pint, which is a little cloudy and seems disinclined to settle so that he can drink it. “Or maybe I’ve just got too used to believing impossible things lately.”

“More impossible than your usual, you mean?” Trewlove contemplates him for a moment. “Sometimes I think it must be nice for you, you know. Getting to have all the mad ideas. It annoys the daylights out of me some days, you know that?”

She’s hardly the first person to say so, but she’s driving at something in particular that Morse can’t make out, so he bites his tongue.

“The thing is,” Trewlove goes on. “You’re allowed to be wrong. When you’ve got an idea about a case, even if it doesn’t stick, there’s generally some sense behind it. So as long as you get it right in the end, you’re all right, aren’t you? People forget the times you got it wrong. But if I have an idea--I have to be right, every time.”

Morse sits back in his chair, watching her closely.

“I get listened to at Cowley,” she says. “More than most girls would in most nicks, I know, and I don’t dare take chances with it. I make a fool of myself once, and maybe no one asks my opinion about anything but the tea cart ever again.”

“I’d like to say you’re wrong,” says Morse, after an uncomfortable pause. “But I can’t guarantee that, can I?"

“No,” she says, fidgeting with the gauze on her hand. “I’m sorry--it doesn’t do any good, does it, venting my spleen at you.”

“You’ve every right to be frustrated,” says Morse. “And I’ve always known you played some things very close. But if you’re thinking something, I for one would like to know what.”

“I wish _I_ knew.” The note of annoyance in her voice turns plaintive. “That’s the trouble. There’s something--but all I keep thinking about is that little girl who might be down there. Might be a ghost, might be an ordinary little kid, might be no girl at all.” She laughs. ”Maybe you were right; maybe I’m haring after nothing.”

“Or you might not be. It’s the weather,” Morse adds, looking over her shoulder at the iced-over front window. It’s old, the frame just a little warped, and frost has crept in over the sill like long white fingers. ”This bloody endless cold. It makes everything seem pointless.”

Trewlove smiles half-heartedly. “You know what bothers me most? I don’t remember the last time I heard a bird, or even saw one. Have you noticed?”

“Not even a duck on the river,” Morse agrees. If all the birds have fled the city to get away from this weather, then by God, he envies them.

\------

“Postmartin has pretty patchy information on the provenance of the de Beaumont manuscripts,” she says next day, in Thursday’s office. “They’ve generally turned up by accident in old trunks or under floorboards, so he can’t say for sure how they wound up where they did, only that most of them were in rough shape and had likely been sitting unread for decades. What I thought was odd is where Dr. Andrews found them--all in small villages, distributed just about evenly around the French border.”

“One might almost think,” says Morse, “that someone wanted to keep them as far apart as possible.”

“Or to focus on a central point,” says Nightingale. “But given current circumstances, I think your interpretation is the right one, Sergeant.”

“Any idea why someone might want to keep them apart, sir?”

“I do, in fact.” Nightingale sighs deeply. “You recall I told you that magical practice can draw on death as a kind of fuel source. Especially human death.”

“But there’ve been no such deaths in Oxford recently,” says Morse. “You confirmed it yourself.”

“No,” says Nightingale. “Not in Oxford, and not recently.” He looks around at the manuscript pages plastered to the walls and ceiling. “It’s these unfortunate people I’m thinking of.”

Trewlove frowns. “They’ve been dead two hundred years. What use would their deaths be to anyone now?”

Nightingale tips his cane restlessly back and forth between his hands. “There is an--art, if you’ll forgive the word--to human sacrifice. I don’t mean ritual, although some schools of thought put great store by it. I mean that, the longer and more unpleasant the death, the more powerful it can be. The Vikings learned many centuries ago how to trap a tortured soul at the point of death, and to weaponize it in all kinds of gruesome ways later. Rather like we use hand grenades now, or land mines. They were very popular with the Germans during the war; demon traps, we called them.”

“Demon traps,” Morse repeats. “Is that what you think these manuscripts are?”

“From what I know of the symbols used,” says Nightingale slowly, thinking it through. “And the way the text is structured--it does seem as though de Beaumont was trying to develop the Viking technology in some new direction. I’ve never heard of it being done with death by exposure, which is supposed to be relatively peaceful, as deaths go. But it’s certainly a lingering, unhappy death, and if inflicted with an eye to maximize suffering--” His jaw is set grimly. ”We can’t hope to know what de Beaumont did, not really, but I don’t think he wrote those manuscripts. Not by sitting down with a pen and an ink bottle. I believe he locked seven people up alone in the cold, left them to die, and what looks to us like handwritten text is in fact the remnants of his victims, trapped between leather covers. Not quite a demon trap, and not a revenge spirit, but something else. Something I haven’t seen before.”

Morse looks around at the complex spirals of text he’s so carefully reconstructed and shudders. “So the manuscripts. They’d be weapons of some kind?”

Nightingale clicks his tongue, thinking. “These seven people died--well, not together, but they were killed in the same way by the same man, and that links them together. Nothing happened until Dr. Andrews completed the set, but once she did, it seems they had an influence on the library even before someone stole them for his own use. Not weapons necessarily, but--” Nightingale looks at Trewlove-- “powerful enough that one might use them to turn the weather, for example.”

“I was joking when I said that,” she says, startled.

“But you were right,” says Nightingale. “And the proof is that Cher is ill. He is the city, in a way--the river, and the land under the city, and the weather. As he sickens, the city will freeze, and vice versa. And with the combined power of the manuscripts, and the life being drained from him--the influence a man could hold over the city would be incalculable.”

“More people are going to die if this keeps up,” says Trewlove. “I don’t mean anything peculiar, like Dr. Andrews. Just babies and old people who can't take a long bitter chill like this. We're not built for this kind of endless freeze, Oxford, not like a city further north would be.”

“Then we’d better find the man doing it,” says Nightingale. “Because I believe, having set in, this cold will go on getting worse until we put a stop to it.”

\-------

The next day is frustratingly slow. Morse wastes much of it under the Bodleian, re-charting tunnels he’s already been through. There’s no more to see than there was before. Nothing in the closet has been touched. It’s maddening; even if the manuscripts were stolen by a wizard, for God’s sake, there must be a physical exit they were carried out by.

Nightingale goes off for the afternoon to interview a don who’s another of Postmartin’s regular borrowers. He comes back to the station briefly, long enough for them to communicate the mutual futility of their day’s labor, and then leaves again for the evening. Morse goes back to his manuscripts, although there’s little chance he’ll find anything of immediate use there.

Trewlove comes in at the end of her shift, just as Nightingale is on his way out. From where he’s sitting on the floor of Thursday’s office, taking notes, Morse sees them exchange a brief, respectful word, but then she vanishes from view towards the changing rooms downstairs.

When she reappears in the doorway of Thursday’s office, she’s out of uniform, bundled into a heavy sweater and trousers bloused over tall leather boots. “It’s not terribly professional, I know,” she says unprompted, and Morse knows the lapse genuinely pains her. “But I’ve been out all day--not that there are even any drivers out lately. Much more of this and my legs go the same way as Dr. Andrews' front door. Any progress?”

“Nothing,” says Morse. “Well. Nothing of use to us in the present day. This woman--” He stands up with an abrupt jerk, takes the step back he knows he needs, and shakes his head.

“What woman?”

“One of de Beaumont’s victims. I’ve been translating that manuscript--” He nods towards it, a long intricate spiral of writing covering much of the floor. “No, don’t look, it’s no good. She talks at first about her husband and children, how she misses them, how they won’t know where she’s gone, but as it goes on she starts to forget. There’s somewhere she needs to be, people she’s lost, but she’s confused. Losing her grip on them.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Nightingale was right; he did this to them on purpose. Drew out their suffering and whittled them down from people into pure misery and fear.”

Perhaps there’s nothing productive to say to this, because after a respectful pause Trewlove says, “It’s Tuesday,” with a note of hope. “If Dr. DeBryn is free--”

“That’s no good either,” says Morse. “The pub’s closed; their pipes burst yesterday.”

“Just as well, maybe,” she admits. “We’ll go on getting slaughtered on the sport questions until Jim gets back.”

The tea cart, at least, is not a total disappointment; Trewlove examines it and returns with two lukewarm cups. In exchange, Morse unearths a packet of biscuits from his desk and offers them to her. “Thanks,” she says, and then pauses, a cup still in each hand.

“Everything all right?”

“Morse,” says Trewlove, an alarming gleam in her eye. “I think I’ve just had a mad idea, and I don’t know how to prove it. But I need you to back me up, just this once.”

Morse looks up. “Of course.”

“And if I’m wrong?”

“Then as your superior officer, I’ll take the blame.” Morse shrugs. “I’m told my reputation can take the blow.”

Trewlove beams for just a moment before sobering. “Then we’ve got to get to Postmartin right away, because Morse--I know who the girl is who died under the Bodleian.”

\-------

The streets are silent and all but deserted. By this time of the month students should be flooding back into the city, but the deepening freeze must be putting them off. They pass a handful of people, bundled cocoons shuffling down the pavement on unavoidable errands, and two or three cars at best. Most shops are closed. In some spots the power lines, crusted heavily with ice, are tilting over the street at alarming angles.

“I thought there was no dead girl,” says Morse, glaring out at the street in front of him. The ice is forcing him to drive slowly even on near-empty roads, and his patience is being severely tested. “Ghostly or otherwise. You called the county, the county called me--no one died down there. The de Beaumont manuscripts caused the disturbance, and a few of the staff got particularly imaginative about it, that’s all.”

”But there was a girl,” says Trewlove. “You found a place she’d used to hide--but you never found how a child could get in, did you?”

“No,” says Morse, and they both know he’s done his damnedest to map out what’s down there.

“Gretchen Andrews knew she was there,” says Trewlove. “She used to leave a digestive out for her every morning--like an offering, Postmartin called it. He told me he’s kept up the habit but the biscuits never go anywhere now; he just throws them in the bin next day.”

“Superstition, maybe. Habit. Mice.” He frowns. “So if there was a girl, not human, but not a ghost, then--what?”

“Isis told you, didn’t she, that all sorts of places might manifest spirits if they had enough history to them. Rivers, mountains, forests, even particularly old or complex human places, right? Like the telephone exchange. Or a very old library.”

“So a live girl after all,” says Morse. “But not born in the ordinary way, so we’d have no record of her. But what makes you think she’s dead?”

“Well, she doesn’t seem to be there now. And if the things that were trapped in de Beaumont’s manuscripts are feeding off Cher’s power now, they must have been drawing power from somewhere else before that.” Trewlove grimaces down at her hands in her lap. “Something more--vulnerable, maybe.”

“From this nascent spirit of the Bodleian.” Morse’s jaw tightens further.

“She’d have been drained like a battery,” says Trewlove quietly. “My guess is that she died the morning we were called out there, when the manuscripts disappeared.”

“It’s a horrible thought.” Morse takes a corner as carefully as possible, but the pool car’s wheels still slip a little on the way around. The engine is grinding alarmingly. They had to try three cars before one would even start; Trewlove doesn’t trust this one to make it as far as they need to go. “But why,” he goes on, once they’ve survived the turn, “are we in such a rush to see Postmartin? Unless you think _he_ killed her and took the manuscripts himself.”

“God, no,” says Trewlove in horror. “Nobody killed her. Nobody took the manuscripts either.”

Morse looks over at her blankly. “In the Homeric sense, do you mean?”

“You promised you’d hear me out,” says Trewlove severely. “Postmartin’s archive was robbed when no robber could have been there; Dr. Andrews died when no one could have been in her house; we were attacked in the reading room when no one else was there. So naturally you’re bent over backwards trying to see what the trick is, and Nightingale is looking for an evil magician, because that’s what _he’s_ got to do.”

“And you think--?”

“I think nobody was there. I think nobody did any of those things. I was wondering all along, but I couldn’t see how--until I realized about the library spirit. If the manuscripts have some kind of power when they’re all in one place--suppose there was never a thief at all. Just these trapped spirits, like Nightingale said, trying to get loose on their own.”

“Hm,” says Morse. She can trust him, thank God, to follow where she’s going. “So Dr. Andrews buys the last of these manuscripts, and bringing them together, wakes them up as some sort of unified power. And then there’s this little girl, who people think is a ghost but you think was a _genius loci_. Nothing to do with them either way, but they feed on her until she’s vanished and they’re strong enough to break loose on their own.”

“Which is when we came in.”

“And then they go after Dr. Andrews. No higher plan. Just anger. I suppose if I had died,” he says distantly, feeling his way through it, “if I’d been alone for a long time, afraid, before I died, and then I woke up trapped in a damn book, I’d be very angry indeed. I might want to hurt whoever seemed to be imprisoning me. Which would be Dr. Andrews, and then--”

“Postmartin,” says Trewlove. “We thought we were attacked for the photographs, but they don’t give a damn; nothing’s happened at the station since you’ve had them there. It’s Postmartin they’ll want.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“Then he’s the best man to tell us so, and I’ll feel a bloody fool, and we can go home.”

\-------

But the Radcliffe Camera is freezing over--actively so, a thick coat of ice coating the dome and flowing down the walls even as they get out of the car. They have to run to make it inside, and even as Morse hauls the heavy doors shut, Trewlove hears a sickening crackle as the ice overflows the lintels. “I hope he’s here,” he says, “because it seems we’re not getting out again in a hurry.”

“I know my way around the book store better than you do,” says Trewlove. “I’ll look downstairs if you go up.”

The small door behind the front desk is unlocked; when she opens it, it releases a blast of cold like going back outside. Overhead, she can hear Morse clattering up the stairs to the upper floors, calling “Dr. Postmartin? Are you here? Dr. Postmartin!”

Trewlove is only a few steps down before his voice fades out of hearing.

A breeze rustles through the stacks as she passes--nothing so dramatic as to take the books back off the shelves, just enough to make her nervous, and perhaps deliberately so. Past the main stacks, the tile of the Link, more mortuary-like than ever in the chill, and then the smaller tunnel branching away from it. Deeper in, she begins to see frost glittering on the whitewashed walls, and quickens her steps. “Dr. Postmartin! Are you down here?”

“Constable!” Postmartin is huddled behind his desk, shivering even under hat and coat and scarf. “I thought perhaps the power--but the lights are still on.”

“We’ve got to get you out of here,” says Trewlove, and tries not to wonder what they can possibly do next. She offers him a hand up. “Is anyone else in the building?”

“I shouldn’t think so, not this late.” Postmartin is shivering violently, but Trewlove vaguely recalls that that’s a better sign than if he weren’t at all, and he gets to his feet readily enough to follow her back the way she’s come. “This is dreadful, you know. The university spends obscene amounts of money on climate control. If the cold sinks in even down here, the damage--”

They’re only a few steps up the stairs when the lights do, after all, go out. Another breeze rustles through the stacks, closer.

Trewlove produces her torch, optimistically; it lights up, emits an unsettling rattle like popping corn and dims almost immediately to nothing. “Cold’s wrecked the batteries.” It’s the third time this week.

“Tell me the truth, Constable,” says Postmartin. “Is this what happened to Gretchen?”

“We won’t let anything happen to you,” says Trewlove, devoutly hoping she’s right as she herds him up the stairs by feel. It seems to her that they creak more heavily under their feet than usual.

Morse meets them, a shadow among shadows on the curving stairs from the first floor. “Thank God. Are you all right, Dr. Postmartin?”

“I’ve been in war, you know,” says Postmartin. “Korea, although it seems very far away now. I know how to fight a man. I don’t know how to fight this.”

“I think he’s fine,” says Trewlove. “More or less.”

They explain her theory to Postmartin, who thinks it over and says, slowly, “I don’t know of any reason you couldn’t be right.”

“There’s certainly no one else here now,” says Morse, “and yet--” He glances up at the ceiling. “What I can’t get my head around,” he adds, “is what happened to the _manuscripts._ ”

“The force of the spirits’ escape might have destroyed them,” Postmartin offers. “It happens to demon traps when they’re triggered.”

Morse sighs. “I knew there was no way they could have been taken out of here.”

Upstairs, the wind picks up. Something rattles like gunfire, and Trewlove looks up sharply. “Morse, are you sure no one else is here?”

“It’s just plastic,” says Postmartin. “They’ve stapled it over the broken window upstairs to keep some warmth in. Shouldn’t we be going now?”

“The doors are frozen shut,” says Trewlove, though she glances at Morse in case she’s missed something.

He shakes his head. “The windows are iced over too, and thickly, it looks like. Even if the glass shatters, we’re sealed in.”

The floor below them is icing over, too, turning rink-smooth with an unpleasant wet kind of noise. Trewlove and Postmartin edge further up the stairs.

“And Nightingale?” says Postmartin hopefully.

“The station is calling his hotel,” says Trewlove. “But we can’t be sure he’s there; he’s been visiting Isis and Cher in the evenings.”

“Well, no offense, officers, but if the things I’ve heard about him are true, I’d rather that one old man right now than both of you.”

“What is he, really?” asks Trewlove, because Morse has begun pacing above them in a way she knows forebodes a particularly messy idea, and she’s nervous enough already without trying to guess what it is.

“The only man in this city who knows what he’s doing, to start with.”

“But _you_ know things, don’t you?” says Morse. “Even if you think you haven’t been paying attention.”

“Like what?”

There’s a crackling noise overhead, and Trewlove looks up. The frost is creeping down the inside of the dome, down the pillars between shelves, a faint glitter and a hiss of cold. Bits of plaster crumble and sift down around them. “Morse, if you’re having an idea, could you have it faster?”

“This thing, these things, whatever they are,” says Morse. “They _were_ men once. And women, and perhaps children, though God, I hope not that.” 

Which is enough for Trewlove to see exactly where he’s headed. “The souls that go into demon traps--do they remember who they are afterwards? Enough to speak to?”

“I don’t know,” says Postmartin. “I don’t think anybody knows. The kind of people interested in bottling up tortured souls like batteries are hardly the kind of people who’d also care whether their victims retain any individuality after death.”

Another gust of wind blows past them, cold and sharp as a knife, carrying a visible dusting of frost. Trewlove shuffles back a step like it’ll help, blows into her hands and turns her coat collar up a fraction higher. “Morse, you said there were details of these people’s lives in those manuscripts. People they loved, people they would miss.”

“Not much. But it’ll have to do.” Morse frees his hands from his pockets long enough to pull his scarf off his face, wincing at the first bite of air. “At least the cold helps the acoustics,” he says, sounding unaccountably sheepish, and then turns his face up and bellows “Listen!” in ringing French.

Trewlove starts. She’s heard Morse shout many times, in urgency or anger; never in full well-trained throat like this. But now, even in speech rather than song, he has a clear strong voice when he makes the effort with it. For a moment his voice cuts right through the wild howl above them, and he sounds like a different man altogether.

“Listen,” he shouts again, and Trewlove, less used to hearing French than to reading it, has to strain a little to follow what he’s saying. “We know what he did to you. We know that you were cold--that you were alone, afraid. It was monstrous, what he did. We know--well, of course you’re angry. Anyone would be.”

“Do you think it’ll work,” says Dr. Postmartin under his breath, “or is he just trying to make us feel better?”

Trewlove squints up into the darkness. “Something’s listening, at least. Look.”

The wind is easing a fraction, or at least her eyes hurt less than they did a minute ago. The frost in the air swirls and eddies in the dome above them, but it’s stopped spreading down the pillars.

"We're not going to talk them into submission," says Postmartin. "I know that much.”

"No, but we haven't frozen solid yet. That’s got to be worth something."

“You were helpless,” Morse is saying. “He made you all feel small, the way he killed you, and all you want is to not feel small any more. You want to feel that you can shape the world with your own hands--or, well--” He pauses and frowns up at the howling cloud overhead.

The trouble is, of course, that Morse is no better a speechmaker in French than he would be in English.

“This isn’t it,” he goes on, but he’s lost some momentum. “This isn’t the way--letting the whole city freeze. It’s no kind of justice.”

The storm opens something like a mouth and roars down at them.

Well, they could hardly expect him to go on arguing with ghosts all night, waiting for the staff to arrive in the morning and try to break in. Though, speaking of which--

"Do you hear that?" says Trewlove, turning to look at the front doors.

There's a rumble and a cracking noise outside, like thunder; Morse falters again just in time to be cut off by a tremendous crash downstairs. “What the hell?” he says, falling back into English.

Trewlove gingerly descends a few slippery stone stairs and leans out over the railing just in time to see the main doors creak open a few feet, admitting a yellow flood of streetlight, and with it Inspector Nightingale. The light seems to coalesce before him, forming an orb like a miniature sun.

“Thomas!” Postmartin calls, beside her. “Up here.” Nightingale looks up in acknowledgement--and then a path melts in the ice before him as he crosses to join them on the stairs. Which must be nice for some.

The light rises too, floating up the stairs and away to illuminate the first and second floors like daylight. The frost coating the dome seems to shrink away, receding into the shadowy alcoves where the windows loom, still iced over. The light is so uncannily like the sun that Trewlove even fancies she's feeling warmer.

"I did tell you," says Postmartin.

Nightingale seems wholly unimpressed with his own defiance of the laws of nature. "Is everyone all right?"

"Sir," says Morse. He's loosening his coat, trying desperately to seem unimpressed as well, and largely failing. "We think--we hope they might be listening to what we say.”

"Then we can try to bring them some peace," says Nightingale. The grim set to his jaw makes it very easy for Trewlove to imagine the soldier he once was.

"And do we know how to do that?" asks Trewlove.

"I think I do." Nightingale pulls something out of his pocket--it looks like a small smooth stone that he might have picked up anywhere on the street. "Most spirits, even those much more stable than these, can be lured by a powerful source of magical energy.'

Morse is still squinting at the light hovering above their heads. "More powerful than that?"

"Oh, that's nothing," says Nightingale. "Schoolboy stuff. Much like this." He smiles briefly as he sets the rock down on the desk. "We used to do it at school, luring ghosts out of the woods to give someone a fright--well. Back when boys were taught this kind of thing."

Postmartin coughs. "So what do we do?"

"I've brought seven of these." Nightingale lines them up on the nearest desk, one by one. "Each is filled with as much magic as I could feasibly will into a naturally formed stone. It'd work better with larger stones, of course, but seeing as I was short on time, we'll have to make do." He conjures a small light in midair by way of demonstration, and the row of stones glows for a moment as the light reddens and fades to nothing.

"Seven pebbles to lure seven spirits," says Trewlove.

"Exactly. My hope is that, if we can divide them, they'll be more manageable."

Morse props his elbows on the desk across from him. "And what does manageable mean, in this context?"

"More intelligent, less aggressive. They will behave, one hopes, like ordinary ghosts."

"Oh, an _ordinary_ ghost. Of course." Trewlove touches a pebble and is mildly surprised to find it cool to the touch. "What exactly do we do with them, sir?"

The reading room is ringed with eight alcoves; one is the stairwell, but they place a pebble in each of the other seven. "I'll have to let it get cold again," says Nightingale. "There's no use luring moths to a flame if you've set a bonfire across the room."

There's no reason it should be unsafe to sit in the center of the room, but Nightingale and Postmartin feel there's no use courting trouble, so they all huddle together at the top of the stairs as the light goes out and the room freezes over again.

"Suppose they're not impressed," says Postmartin through chattering teeth. "A magical force powerful enough to chill a whole city might not be particularly interested in a few pebbles."

Nightingale leans out to survey the room. Ice is creeping down the walls, heavier than before. Something creaks heavily, and Trewlove wonders just how much cold even sturdy old wood like this can take. "Then I'll make something bigger."

"Shh," says Morse. "Look."

The swirling ice storm has reformed above them, but it roils in confusion. Slowly, too slowly, it produces seven thinner tendrils, each creeping towards an alcove.

Trewlove rubs at her hands; she can't feel her fingertips, or her nose. Whatever's happening, she hopes it happens soon.

The ice cloud spirals downward, separates, coalesces into seven pillars. "Oh my God," says Trewlove, and climbs to her feet to see better

The faintest images of seven men and women are standing in the reading room, haloed in ice crystals. They look sad; they look lost. None of them speak, or seem inclined to.

"We should look," says Morse. "We should remember their faces. God knows no one else will."

So they watch, all four of them, as the shades of de Beaumont’s victims soften and dissolve into the air, the ice recedes from the walls without trace, the unnatural cold easing and lightening. The lights don’t come back on, but that’s likely too much to ask.

“Are they gone?” asks Trewlove after a minute.

“I’m not sure,” Nightingale admits. “But without their massed rage to keep them going, I’d think they’ll fade fairly soon in a place they have no particular ties to. They’re long overdue for it.”

“I think I can live with that,” says Postmartin, “but right now I’d very much like to go home.”

\-------

“Good morning, Morse,” says Thursday, with a familiar weary resignation tempered by a scratchy throat. “I thought you’d wait more than three months after making Sergeant before you came after my office.”

“It was here or the evidence room, and Inspector Nightingale preferred somewhere less conspicuous.” Morse, who’s been on his knees carefully disassembling his spread of photographs and shuffling them back into their folder, scrambles to his feet. “You should have told me you were back today, sir; I’d have driven you.”

“Well, I thought you were in the middle of something with Nightingale, and I didn’t want to pull you away, but I see I’ve already missed all the excitement.” Thursday navigates behind his desk and settles into his chair with a contented sigh. “Got it sorted out, did you?”

“More or less.” Morse remembers his tea, lukewarm and neglected on the corner of the desk, and takes an unpleasant sip. “God knows how we’ll explain any of it on the record--”

“I’m not surprised.”

“--but sir, I want it to be clear, one way or another, that it was Trewlove who got it in the end. She caught something Nightingale and I both missed.”

“It won’t do any good, you know,” says Thursday.

“Sorry?”

“Mr. Bright told me, after your promotion came through, he’d make Trewlove a DC in your place if there was a chance in hell he could get away with it. Neither of us thought he could.”

“All the more reason to put it in black and white, then,” says Morse, and goes back to gathering up his photographs.

\-------

In the light of day, the reading room is unsurprisingly in rough shape, but not as rough as Morse seems to remember. The shelves upstairs are still collapsed and the books scattered, but the tables are turned upright again, and one or two pillars are whole and strong that he’d swear he saw crack. 

“It’s the least I can do,” says Nightingale. “The university can and will blame most of the damage on climate control failure during the cold snap. But with the start of term coming up, I might as well make it easier on the librarians before the students return and lay siege.”

“Do you often use it like this?” Morse has collected Postmartin’s photographs of the de Beaumont manuscripts back into their folder, and he turns it restlessly in his hands. “Just doing magic, for its own sake.”

“Not often. Certainly not as much as I used to.” Nightingale’s fingers twitch on the head of his cane. Across the room, a pile of books shuffles into a neat stack. He seems, to Morse’s eye, to be quietly enjoying himself very much.

“Did you mean what you said to Isis? About magic dying out in Britain.”

“It’s what I’ve believed for a long time. I’ve got comfortable with the idea. But truthfully, lately--” Nightingale pauses to contemplate. “An old friend came up to visit me in London a year or so ago. A lapsed practitioner. He said the city was changing--that its magic felt different, in a way he couldn’t explain. I admit I rather thought he was imagining it, but then again, he rarely visits the city, and I rarely leave it.”

“Like a boiling frog, sir?”

“You flatter me, Sergeant. But perhaps I’ll see things differently when I get home. Or perhaps Isis and I are both right, and the magic I know is fading to be replaced by something new.”

Morse doesn’t know how to respond. He might wish Nightingale peace, or certainty, or at least the longevity to find either, but they don’t know each other well enough for him to politely say so. “Well, sir,” he says at last, “it’s certainly been interesting working with you.”

Behind them, the door to the stairs squeaks painfully and emits Trewlove. “Sir,” she says politely to Nightingale. “Morse, we ought to go; they’ll be expecting us back at the station soon.”

“And I still have work to do here, if you’ll excuse me, Sergeant, Constable.” Nightingale moves away to the far side of the room. In his wake, two banks of shelves seem to right themselves, and books shower up from the floor into neat stacks to be reshelved later.

"What worries me is,” says Morse, watching him go, “what’s the use of us, Trewlove, if magic is real? If there’s no real logic in the world. If anyone can do anything for no reason at all."

“In a rational world, I wouldn’t have a burn and frostbite on the same fingers.” Trewlove examines her hand and winces. “Anyway, I think that's just people in general, magic or not.”

Morse shrugs acquiescence; the gesture reminds him of the folder tucked under his arm. “Wait for me a moment? I need to return these to Postmartin.”

The stacks below are less charming than ever, particularly since the cold has damaged the wiring and the lights keep flickering in his peripheral vision. There are no librarians here--the place will need more serious repair before it’s even fit to store books again--but Morse thinks he sees a shadow darting out of sight around the next corner. “Someone there?” he asks, feeling foolish.

“Shh!” says somebody in the next aisle, a small high voice somewhere around waist height. “I’m hiding.”

Morse blinks, astonished, and smiles. “You’re very good at it. We thought you were--gone,” he corrects himself, just in time.

“I’m still learning how to be solid,” says the girl’s voice, sadly. “I’m not very good at touching things sometimes. But it’s very good for hiding. There was a monster, you know,” she adds. “It _hurt_. I’m Delie. Who are you?”

“My name’s Morse. And the monster’s gone for good now. Are you all right?”

“It tore up such a lot of my books,” says Delie, with a flash of grown-up peevishness.

“Would you like to come upstairs, Delie? I know someone who’d like to know that you’re all right.” A few people, in fact, but he doesn’t want to overwhelm her.

“I don’t think so,” says Delie. She sounds a little more distant, somehow. “I think I’m tired of talking now. It’s so much work being _real_ ,” she adds, plaintively.

Morse finds he can’t argue with this sentiment.

When he emerges into the sunlight above, Trewlove says, “You’re smiling.” Her tone suggests this is grounds for concern.

“I met a little girl downstairs.” Morse rounds the staff desk to join her. “She says her name is Delie.”

“Delie--oh!” She beams back at him. “Well, that’s one thing that’s gone right, at least.”

He doesn’t feel entirely settled about leaving Delie down there, but Postmartin’s promised to keep an eye, and in any case how were they going to force her to come out? For all Morse knows, she physically couldn’t leave the library even if she wanted to. “She seems to me like she’ll be all right, if rather weak. I promised her I’d send Isis along to check on her soon. And you, if you’d care to.”

“I suppose I’ll go with Isis, when she goes. Thank you.”

Morse composes himself back to a semblance of professionalism. "Feel like lunch on our way back?”

Trewlove contemplates him for a moment longer than the question seems to require. “You know,” she says. “There’s a new place around the corner from the station, does a lovely Chinese. If you’d care to get a look in before the rest of the station catches on.”

Nightingale politely declines to join them; they make their final farewells and leave him there. 

The weather has softened considerably; outside, it’s snowing big fat scenic flakes, soaking the hair and coats of everyone on the street.

“Practically feels like springtime,” says Trewlove.

“The paper said twenty degrees today,” says Morse. Which would be miserably harsh, most years, but after the past few weeks it’s positively balmy. He unwinds his scarf and pushes damp hair out of his face.

“As I said.” Trewlove folds her hands primly behind her back. A flock of starlings scatters irritably at their feet as they cross the lawn.

**Author's Note:**

> "You prepare to set sail, a stormy sea forbids: let me enjoy the blessing which a rough winter offers. Behold how the blustering east-wind raises the foaming waves. Let me owe that to winter and a stormy sea, which I would rather owe to your love; the winds and waves have more of justice than you." - Ovid, Epistulae Heroidum: Dido to Aeneas
> 
> "The twelvemonth and a day being up, the dead began to speak: ‘Oh who sits weeping on my grave, and will not let me sleep?’" - English traditional folk song


End file.
